Dialogs with… pedestals

The museum has revamped its exposition owing to the efforts of its own specialists and the German curator Michael Fehr. The project is part of “Time Machine. Museums in the 21st Century,” a Goethe Institute program in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “We had been long discussing this project, then came the Maidan, and heroes became an extremely topical theme,” says Maryna SKYRDA, Deputy Director General of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, in charge of research and popularization. “We began to ponder over what heroes, heroic, and heroization is. We have revised from this angle our collection of paintings and sculpture that covers the Middle Ages to the 1980s.”

In the vestibule, visitors come across… a big bust of Lenin. This bust has always been here, but it was hidden behind the curtains when independence came. So, the National Museum shows that it is prepared to display its “skeletons.” The spectator walks through the exhibit on a cracked and moth-eaten red carpet. Each hall has a name – it is often a line from a song that was topical at a certain period. There are numbers instead of name labels. Each hall has an inventory book, in which you can read a lot of information about an object marked by one of these numbers – who and where made it, what persons and events are associated with it, etc. There is even a column for legends about one work or another.

The first hall is about socialist labor. You will find Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Station (Dniprohes) workers, Siberia pioneers, and collective farmers here. The curators show the model of a socialist labor hero. For example, Dmytro Krvavych’s sculpture High Award and Tetiana Golembiievska’s picture of the same name portray the same image – a braided girl who presses a medal to her heart.

The spectators suddenly see the little Lenin and Stalin. The knee-high statues of the leaders are “scrutinizing” an installation – a pile of Lenin’s portraits, busts, and replicas of monuments. “The leader of the world proletariat” is everywhere with the same facial expression, the “trademark” goatee, wearing a three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a peaked cap – an idol rather than a human being. The museum’s collection also contains as many artworks about World War Two. To emphasize this and just to show one more variety of its exhibits, the museum placed battle-scene canvases on book racks – the way they are kept in the repository. You cannot see the pictures live – only illustrations in the inventory books.

Record-setting workers and Red Army men give way to Ukrainian noblemen, hetmans, and Cossack colonels. These people – in luxury attires, with coats-of-arms, maces and other symbols of power – look solemn and nonliving on gala portraits. Much in contrast to this pomp, you can suddenly see Anatolii Bazylevych’s illustrations to Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Aeneid. Cossacks are portrayed here in an ironical key as swashbucklers, merrymakers, and brawlers. Yet the burlesque does not deny their heroism. People love their heroes, and laughter only adds strength to them.

Walking through the gallery of intellectuals – Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stus, and Lina Kostenko, – the spectator enters the hall of Taras Shevchenko. The poet’s contemporaries and Soviet propaganda interpreted the Great Kobzar’s figure differently. Showcases display the drawings made by Kharkiv-based artists in 1939. They depict episodes of the poet’s life from childhood to death. The series ends with a picture of the crowd of Soviet working people around the just-built Shevchenko Museum. These works have something in common with the images of saint martyrs on the opposite side. Then Oleksandr Hnylytsky’s picture Daddy, the Helmet’s Too Tight suddenly “pops up.” With his back to the audience, the saints, and Shevchenko, the hero takes us to the era of independence, when heroes ceased to be created.

There are only chairs and a rostrum in the exhibit’s last hall. The museum plans to hold public debates here in order to reconsider the heroism of the past, the present, and the future. The “reference point” for discussions is a quotation from Bertolt Brecht’s drama Life of Galileo written on the wall. Galileo’s pupil Andrea says that the land that has no heroes is unhappy, to which Galileo responds: “No, unhappy is the country that needs heroes.” For heroes are often victims. Besides, a hero shaped by society hides everything human “behind the scenes.” All that remains visible is a role model, an idol.

“This project is social psychotherapy,” Skyrda notes. “The well-known things revive and reveal the multilayered nature of customary figures.” Together with audiences, the artworks act in a play that ends with the individual having his or her catharsis.

The project “Heroes. An Inventory in Progress” will last at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv until March 29, 2015.